“Define rough.”
“The kind where you both look like you lost a fight with each other and are somehow happy about it.”
Cass blushed so hard Riot felt it—a sudden flare of warmth across his own cheekbones that had nothing to do with the expired coffee. He touched his face. That was... that wasCass’sembarrassment, registering inhisbody.
What the actual fuck.
“We should talk about the route,” Sage said, apparently deciding she’d pushed enough. “Springfield Gardens is maybe four, five hours if the roads hold. They won’t hold, so call it six to eight.”
“Any choke points?” Riot asked, because choke points were a safer topic than the fact that he was apparently experiencing someone else’s emotional states through his face.
“Three. Two bridge crossings and a stretch through Berserker territory south of the old Route 36.” Sage’s voice went flatter. “That last stretch is the problem. Wild packs have been expanding their territory all spring. Lilac’s intel was three months old.”
“We’ll deal with it,” Riot said.
The road south was worse than yesterday.
Yesterday had been craters and abandoned vehicles and the occasional overgrown intersection that required creative navigation. Today was active decay—a stretch of highway where the asphalt had buckled into a series of ridges and troughs, the result of fifty years of freeze-thaw cycles without a maintenance crew. Riot navigated by memory and instinct, taking the dirt shoulders when the road surface became impossible.
The walkie crackled. “Southern bridge is intact. Barely. One lane. I’m crossing first to test weight.”
“Copy.”
They watched Sage’s jeep inch across a concrete bridge that looked like it was being held together by optimism and moss. The jeep made it. Riot followed and the sedan handled the crossing with slightly less dignity.
“Can I hold your jacket?” Cass asked.
Riot’s flannel was balled up between the seats. Cass pulled it into his lap before Riot answered, pressing his face into the collar and breathing deep. When he came up, some of the tension in his shoulders had eased.
“It helps,” Cass said, not apologizing for it. “Your scent.”
“I know.”
They drove in silence for a while. Riot’s hands were tight on the wheel. The landscape was getting less familiar—he’d taken this route twice before, years ago, but the Static Zone rearranged itself constantly. Roads washed out, overpasses collapsed, new obstacles materialized. Every mile south was a mile closer to Elysian territory and a mile further from the Collective and every instinct he had—Berserker and otherwise—was displeased.
He was taking Cass back to the place that had tortured him. Back to the man behind the door. And the plan, such as it was, required Riot to walk through the front gates and smile about it.
This is insane. This entire thing is insane. We are going to walk into a corporate cult that owns an entire city and pretend I want to be there and hope nobody notices the Berserker sweating through his spiritual vocabulary.
“You’re gripping the wheel hard,” Cass observed.
Riot loosened his hands. Marginally.
“Riot.” Cass shifted to face him, tucking one leg underneath him. “We should talk about how to act when we get there. You need to know some things about how people talk inside.”
“Okay.”
“So when a seeker arrives the first thing that happens is a welcome. Everyone’s very kind.” He said this without irony, without bitterness. Just stating a fact about his home. “They’ll ask you why you’ve come, and you need to be honest. Especially you, because they are very afraid of Berserkers. I don’t want them to turn you away.”
“What do I say exactly?”
“Just tell them you’re seeking peace.” Cass said it simply, like it was obvious. “Say you’re struggling with earthly aggression.”
Struggling with earthly aggression.
The words should have sounded ridiculous, but Cass was handing him the vocabulary of the world they were about to enter, the way someone might teach another person a few phrases before visiting a foreign country.
The fact that the country in question had hurt Cass was something Riot was going to have to sit with quietly, because Cass still talked about Springfield Gardens the way people talked about hometowns. With affection. With belonging. With the bone-deep familiarity of someone who’d grown up there and didn’t know that normal was a thing other people got to have.
